I was using Scrivener on Windows since the first version, now I have got a MacBook Air which I love to use when writing on the living room couch
I have now Scrivener in Version 3 installed on the Mac as well on Win11.
(MacOS Ver: 13.2.1 (22D68), Scrivener Ver. 3.2.3)
(Win11, Scrivener Ver. 3.1.4.0)
I have installed on both devices the same fonts which I am using for writing the manuscript.
But there are some differences between the Win and Mac version in look and feel, which are not functional (at least to me) but cosmetical
The font for the notes in the inspector are very small in Scrivener for Mac. If I increase the size to a readable size, and opening later the project in Scrivener for Windows, it is far too large.
It looks like that in Scrivener for MacOS, I cannot adjust the size of the bars like in the version for Windows. This options seems not to exist in the MacOS version.
The page view in the MacOS version is more … beautiful because it is more like a light shadow showing the borders of the sheet, while in Windows it is a black frame that looks ugly.
You see, it is just optical blahblah, but I would be happy to be able to adjust the settings. Most important to me would be to be able to adjust the icon size in the bar as well as the size of the bars on MacOS as I can do that in the Windows edition.
Yeah, what was said above, you can’t expect the same exact software on two different operating systems unless it is written in a cross-platform toolkit. While the Windows version is, and thus could be made to run on the Mac, it was decided early on to stick with native Mac development. The result of the opposite would have made Scrivener for Mac something more like LibreOffice for Mac. It would feel like it came from another universe, and its integration with the system would be diminished.
The font for the notes in the inspector are very small in Scrivener for Mac. If I increase the size to a readable size, and opening later the project in Scrivener for Windows, it is far too large.
This is always going to be a bit of an issue in a system that shares the same font sizes across platforms, in conjunction with the same magnification settings. We could maybe give some thought to partitioning the magnification settings per platform instead of making it a shared setting—but we have to keep in mind that not everyone (maybe not most) use this as a precision setting. They are more just looking to get the text up to 400%-ish levels or whatever.
As for why 1 does not equal 1 everywhere, Apple uses the printing industry standard measurement of 72 points (we used to think of them as pixels, but that’s a bit abstract these days with high-res screens) per inch for size calculations, while Microsoft went their own way with 96 points per inch. Furthermore, with Microsoft Word there is a level of text magnification being done at 100%, such that in Word, 100% actually isn’t 100%, it’s about 135%. So even though this is kind of arbitrary, we’ve followed that lead since everyone is used to how massive text is in Word in the Windows world. Thus 100% isn’t really 100% in Scrivener for Windows either… and you can see where this is going when you’ve got one OS that treats 100% as 12pt text at 72pt/in verbatim, and the other OS is just making up numbers and fudging measurements to make things look consistent between software on a screen, both sharing the same preference file.
Thanks for the extensive explanation
I understand that it is almost impossible to make one piece of software identically on different platforms. But e.g. I was hoping to have the ability to change the main bar size of Scrivener on MacOS as I can do that on the Windows edition.
But maybe there is a way to do that but I have not found it by now?
Relative to Windows, Mac OS enforces a standard “look” across all applications. Details like the “chrome” that makes up the boundaries of a window are defined as part of the Mac OS toolkit.
I was hoping to have the ability to change the main bar size of Scrivener on MacOS as I can do that on the Windows edition.
If you’re talking about the main toolbar that’s not even our code on the Mac, it’s just the stock system toolbar and it has no support for arbitrary size changes. I think there is better support for scalable vector graphics now in such contexts, but I know that historically there wasn’t and so a lot of our icons are raster, meaning freely scaling them would make a mess.
